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Anxiety
Paranoia in Everyday Life
When there are no messages between the lines.
Updated April 3, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
When I was in graduate school, a fellow student once happened not to receive an email sent to all graduate students and thought that, perhaps, he’d been expelled from the program and that no one had told him. This thought he had against his own better judgment. He knew things don’t really work that way: Graduate school is not an organization with an intransparent structure and murky unstated rules from which one can be thrown out without warning or explanation. (Though apparently, a sorority can be such an organization. Listen to a remarkable story about a woman named “Rose” who got kicked out of her sorority and told only, “You know what you did.”)
My former fellow student’s groundless apprehension is by no means unusual. “Why did he ask me that?” “Why did she take several days to respond?” and so on, are common reactions to daily exchanges that carry no special meaning. What we see is often what we get in human communication, and the hidden messages we read between the lines quite simply aren't there. I would call this tendency to take anodyne daily occurrences to portend more than they do “paranoia in everyday life.” Like many clinical conditions, paranoia has garden-variety manifestations that may be very widespread. This is what I am interested in here: What is mundane paranoia? What explains it? What are its consequences?
Paranoia and Its Doubles
It is important to note that the tendency I have in mind may, upon occasion, give rise to groundless hope and to the building of sandcastles, not simply to baseless fears. While baseless apprehension is more common than misplaced elation, the two are, in some sense, two sides of the same coin: Both result from its seeming to us that gestures, utterances, or events with no special meaning are in fact significant. Neuroticism may alter perception not simply by making its object look bleak, but also by enhancing the object's color and vivacity. And since the two propensities often have a common origin, they may co-occur, leading to emotional instability whereby one day, a person expects to become the king of the world, and the next day—to be rejected as an outcast (and, sometimes, to go from one to the other extreme in the course of a single afternoon). Where do these tendencies come from?
Madness Without Malady
Mundane paranoia resembles, in some ways, the mental state of a person who is physically ill. To the one who is ill, ordinary objects and events appear meaningful in new ways. Virginia Woolf, in her essay “On Being Ill,” discusses this phenomenon, writing that illness may imbue:
…certain faces with divinity, setting us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathing the faces of the absent … with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them…
And later: In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning…
But while in both physical illness and what I label “everyday paranoia,” the mind may see significance where there is none (or not what the mind sees), it is only in illness that the world acquires a felt mystic quality. The ill person’s attachment to ordinary life is weakened. In illness, we may abdicate our responsibilities and even feel oddly liberated from our own bodies. Illness leads to fevers but also to fever dreams. Fevers shackle us; dreams send the mind to new worlds, and it is in those worlds that something out of the ordinary may be found.
By contrast, everyday paranoia is very much about life as we know it. Perception is distorted there too, but the distorted vision itself is ordinary. The apprehensive and neurotic perception, unlike that of the ill person, remains close to daily occurrences and human intentions. While the bedridden may experience herself as a new person, the one with everyday paranoia is just who he has always known himself to be. He would, perhaps, like not to be that anymore but cannot help it.
Both illness and everyday paranoia resemble dreaming as well as madness, since both to a dreamer and to a person in the grip of madness, everything seems impregnated with meaning. Nor is this surprising: Meaning is often felt, not simply rationally comprehended, and when we are in a state of intense feeling, we may see significance where there isn’t any, because we feel as though there is.
Yet daily paranoia differs from all three in that it may become a person’s default state. We wake up from dreams and recover from illness—and even from periods of madness—but everyday paranoia is often due to temperamental proclivities and survives attempts to reason oneself out of it. We may, like the fellow student I began with, see all too well that there is no good reason to think what we thought yet be unable to escape the nagging suspicion that perhaps, somehow, improbably, there is.
Anxiety’s Stranglehold
But it is not only the mind's proneness to find significance in unlikely places that explains the phenomenon. There is another element: Life in general is open to interpretation. Every happening, every word, and every silence can mean more than they, at first, appear to and can be interpreted in multiple ways. True, some interpretations are implausible, but often, you cannot decisively prove to yourself that there really was nothing more that someone meant than what the person said. You can demand reassurance, and the other can offer it, but the reassurance may be short-lived (the other will soon say something else!), and the words and gestures used by our interlocutor to calm us down would, in turn, be open to interpretation.
We see this dance of anxiety and reassurance play out in romantic relationships sometimes, much to love’s detriment. In closing, I would like to focus on that case. To the anxious and mundanely paranoid person, no reassurance ever suffices.
“What a wonderful person!” the lover says.
“Do you mean I am not wonderful?” comes the response.
“Of course, you are. That’s not what I meant at all.”
This may provide temporary relief to the anxious mind, but the misgivings come back: “Why did she say Arden is a wonderful person? What did she mean by that?”
Anaïs Nin, thinking along similar lines, wrote in her diary:
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning… our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them…
Yet, paranoid anxiety can be overcome, if not solely through reason (it may survive our own best judgment that there is no ground for apprehension or fear) than through love. But for that, we have to focus on what our daily paranoia is doing to the people we care about. Nin, in fact, says that she eventually overcame her own anxiety by doing just that:
It took me years of sorrow to learn these airy birds’ spirals around the loved ones so that the love should never crystallize into a prison. …[Anxiety] is the one contagious illness of the spirit one must preserve others from, if one loves. For it has nothing to do with love, it is its antithesis, and no love can thrive within the walls of fears.
